Livestock Farming in Developing Countries

This section introduces some of the issues in subsistence livestock farming that impact on animal welfare. They are dealt with in greater detail in Chapter 2.

Reasons for keeping livestock

In industrialized countries the main reason for keeping livestock is to make money from producing meat, milk, wool or eggs. The situation in poorer countries is quite different. In Africa and Asia, rearing ruminants, particularly cattle, is one of the best ways for rural people to accumulate wealth. Many rural communities in developing countries do not use banking facilities. Instead, they invest their savings in livestock, and the aim is to increase wealth by breeding more animals. Livestock also provide some security against crop failure and currency fluctuations, if the need arises. Producing cattle for meat is often a subsidiary aim. However, cattle are used for meat consumption when:

● they have reached the end of their working life and need to be replaced

● the owner needs to sell them to raise money

In many of the Sahelian countries of Africa, the annual offtake for cattle is less than 10%. This increases the risk of overstocking. When hard times hit, such as a drought or political unrest, the accumulated wealth in the form of livestock is protected by the owner for as long as possible. Selling or slaughtering the stock during such times is a last resort. However, failure to sell early during a severe drought has catastrophic consequences for animal as well as human welfare.

Cattle, sheep and goats serve quite different functions, as can be seen for rural people in Lesotho from Tables 1.9 and 1.10. Cattle have an important role in trading and as gifts. They are used for local consumption mainly on important ceremonial occasions, whereas sheep, goats and poultry are more regular sources of meat in village life (Swallow et al ., 1987). Mortality is the main reason livestock are not retained for the next year. Over one-third of non-retained animals are either traded, given away or used in debt settlement (Table 1.9).

Table 1.9. Uses of livestock in Lesotho rural households during 1985.

Table 1.10. Reasons for livestock slaughter in rural Lesotho in 1985.

During favourable times, animals are continuously bought, sold and exchanged, and the market is very active. Where livestock have investment value and the owner is looking to profit from bartering, it is in his interests to look after the stock. However, stature is more important than body condition in determining price, and so emaciation is not so heavily penalized as it would be in other farming communities. In addition, the incentive to care for stock is not so strong amongst livestock dealers or stock people who do not own the animals.

In countries such as Morocco, sheep are a way of banking capital, but they are not looked upon as an investment. In other words, they are a financial reserve and there is less emphasis on trying to increase their value. This is reflected in the way they are fed. During the dry season they subsist on crop by-products such as stubble and weeds growing on fallow.

Investing in livestock is particularly important during periods of monetary inflation. Suppose a young man moves temporarily from his village to earn a wage in a town or city. He is likely to save his earnings in the form of livestock, which are kept at his home village, rather than holding cash that is losing value. Later on, he will move back to the village and live off the wealth he has accumulated as livestock. In this situation, livestock are a good form of investment, provided they are sold or exchanged before they die. Their value can be more easily realized than a house or mortgage, which would be the equivalent investment in developed countries. In addition, there are good opportunities to gain from the market by buying low and selling high.

Traditionally, livestock in Africa have been readily exchanged when paying debts or purchasing goods such as maize, millet and beans. They are also used for settling secondary education fees or for the loan of a milch cow. In the past, trading caravans specialized in servicing some of the trading needs in cashless remote communities by exchanging commodities between the pastoral and agricultural sectors, and livestock were an important trading commodity. Now there are regional markets, which have replaced the nomadic livestock traders.

During the last two centuries there have been two important influences that have modified the role of livestock as a form of investment. First, there has been greater need for monetary currency, especially for paying taxes. Money has also become a substitute for settling debts. Secondly, acquisition of better land for crop production has left pastoralists with the poorer land and there is less opportunity to range widely and move stock to other regions when the need arises. As a result the impact of localized droughts is potentially more serious now than it was about 150 years ago, and the risks associated with keeping livestock are greater.

In regions such as the highly populated East African highlands, land subdivision is placing pressure on feed resources, and zero-grazing napier fodder ( Pennisetum purpureum ) and crop residues are becoming more common. The animal welfare benefits of changing from free-grazing to cut-and-carry systems are less tick infestation and fewer tick-borne disease problems, but there is greater risk of underfeeding and reduced cow fertility.

Productivity in cut-and-carry systems is limited by the availability of labour and the quality of the feed. Some sheep farmers spend as much as 2 h a day collecting enough forage for one sheep. Most tropical grass species have a high fibre content, and their feeding value is low in protein and minerals. Goats or lambs fed napier fodder alone can grow at 20 to 25 g per day and this can be increased to about 50 g per day if they are offered tree legume foliage or wilted cassava leaves as a protein supplement ( Johnson and Djajanegara, 1989).

Cut-and-carry systems are becoming very common in Indonesia and India. Here, the animals may be penned throughout the year, or during periods when there is a risk of livestock damage to crops. In humid regions this risk period extends for most of the year. In Indonesia small stock are generally well cared for, even though they have limited freedom to exercise. They are kept in groups of five to eight in raised pens under thatched roofs, and they are separated from their dung and urine by a slatted floor (Fig. 1.1). They are usually given more feed than they need because the farmers want excess feed to fall into the pit below the pen where it will soak up urine. Farmers value the manure as much as the animals (Tanner et al. , 2001).

Fig. 1.1. Type of raised shed used for sheep and goats in East Asia.

In time, livestock could be replaced by other forms of saving and investment, and when this happens there will be more emphasis on making money from farming livestock instead of keeping them as security.

Overstocking

Overstocking is the main environmental hazard in keeping livestock in developing countries. It leads to loss of ground cover, and this impacts on the welfare of animals when it reaches the stage of chronic underfeeding. Loss of vegetation occurs in the following ways:

● Insufficient opportunity to allow the plants to recover between grazings.

● Physical damage such as trampling and pugging.

● Tearing the growing points out of the plant.

● Urine scald.

The grazing habit of sheep is particularly damaging because they are bottom grazers. In other words, they eat pasture close to the ground, and in pasture species that have their growing point above ground level this can be very destructive. Sheep grazing encourages the survival of less-productive pasture species, or, in the absence of these, the land can become bare or infested with inedible species, and the topsoil is prone to erosion, especially from wind or landslip. Erosion of the topsoil leaves behind a less fertile subsoil or bare rock. In rangeland farming, four approaches can be used when managing stocking density and trying to avoid overstocking:

● The land is stocked at a fixed rate according to its perceived long-term carrying capacity.

● Livestock are cropped according to current feed availability or imminent changes in feed availability (e.g. seasonal slaughter).

● Stock are moved within the rangeland according to water and feed availability (e.g. transhumance herding, nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoral systems).

● Stock are thinned on a needs-must basis such as raising cash or paying debts.

The chosen method depends on the economic position of the pastoralist, his/her attitude towards risk, the resilience of the vegetation to short-term overgrazing, and variability of the weather in that region.

Labour requirements can be demanding in subsistence pastoralism. Labour enables better distribution of grazing pressure, which helps limit localized overgrazing. Nomadic pastoralism is an extreme form of this type of droving management, but it has been declining in recent decades because of greater enforcement of country borders and animal health control boundaries. More often, children are responsible for stock movement when grazing near home, and adolescent or adult men supervise stock that are trekked and grazed over a wider area.

Transhumance, agistment and semi-nomadic farming

About one billion people live in the world’s arid and semi-arid regions (Squires and Sidahmed, 1997). These regions provide a livelihood for about 40 million pastoralists plus an unknown number of people involved in seasonal transhumance systems. Being semi-arid, these regions do not support productive cropping, but instead they are home for large numbers of rangeland cattle, sheep, goats, camels and wild ungulates. These animals subsist for about 6 months of the year during the dry season. This means they are halfstarved, they mature slowly, start producing young later in life and produce limited milk.

Seasonal feed shortages, droughts and disease are the three main reasons for transhumance. Transhumance involves moving stock to another area where there is more feed or the disease risk is lower. It is a form of supervised migration where the herdsman directs the stock between areas of pasture and water sources. A transhumance period may last for weeks or months, and the herdsman stays out at night with his livestock or at a cattle post. It is a temporary semi-nomadic existence. Agistment is the transfer of stock to distant grazing land and paying a fee for the care and feeding of the animals.

In recent times both nomadic and seminomadic pastoralists have been able to adopt a more sedentary existence because of the reduced incidence of trypanosomiasis. The downturn in this tsetse fly-borne disease is partly due to active control programmes in the southern half of Africa and because of declining wildlife, which acts as a natural food source for the fly, plus reduced rainfall in some parts leading to less favourable conditions for the fly. Instead, the fly is cycling within the cattle population, and so it has been easier to control, especially where tolerant zebu cattle are kept.

The change to a sedentary lifestyle has had social repercussions. Some nomadic people have in the past had a poor relationship with agriculturalists. Since they have been nomadic, there has been little need for them to get on socially with other people. Now they are living closer to other people, who, over the years, have accumulated grudges against the former nomads. Social grievances such as these sometimes come to a head when straying stock damage crops, and animal maltreatment is one outlet for anger or frustration.

In other cases, nomads have in the past provided valued services for agricultural communities. Some nomads have been traders, and their arrival at a village provided an opportunity to buy the goods they dealt in. Nomads also had valued skills such as castrating cattle, and provided remedies or health care for the agriculturalists’ sick animals. The interdependence of nomads and sedentary agriculturalists and communities is now declining.

Absence of proper veterinary care is a welfare issue in transhumance systems. Veterinary care is also improvised and rudimentary because of the cost of registered veterinary medicines. Sometimes livestock owners claim that they do not have any animal health problems, but this may be due to lack of awareness of the signs. In addition, in some districts farmers are not aware that there are community veterinary services and that animal diseases can be treated with modern drugs.

Enclosure of common land

Common land is used by landless poor people for grazing cattle, sheep, goats and, to a lesser extent, pigs. This form of pastoralism has virtually disappeared in Europe, but it is still important within Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia, especially for goats. When common land has been enclosed, it has often been distributed to farmers and people in the lower income group. Some of their holdings have been purchased and amalgamated into larger farms. In this way, large amounts of land that were used for grazing and for collecting fuel have been privatized and converted into cropping land, particularly in regions that can support irrigation. Hens and goats are assuming greater importance on those smallholdings that continue to keep livestock, especially in areas with high populations.

Four systems are used for goats:

● confined throughout the year

● free-range

● seasonally confined

● tethered

The last three apply to goats kept on common land. Seasonal confinement is becoming the most common system, and confinement coincides with the critical period when crops need protecting. This often extends from when the crops are sown until the harvest is taken.